Nimby Spells Protest In Suburbs

September 02, 1990|By David Young.

At first glance, the recent buffalo roast in Big Rock did not seem to have any more social relevance than the Sugar Grove corn boil or Harvard Milk Days.

But Donna Sauber, a farmer`s wife from nearby Virgil Township, was not slinging buffalo burgers in the 86-degree heat of the Kenny Park pavilion for charity. She was trying to raise money to stop a garbage dump from being built on her family`s 2,000-acre farm in western Kane County.

The buffalo roast fundraiser was organized by EDKO, the latest citizens protest group to come into existence to fight things as disparate as bike trails, radioactive thorium dumps, gravel pits, apartment developments, expressways and landfills.

The American tradition of citizens banding together to right wrongs has been around since colonial times, and today`s groups, especially in suburbia, seem better educated and better organized than their predecessors. They regularly communicate among themselves, often swapping trade secrets and game plans, and some even use professional organizers.

As a result, the groups are giving federal, state and local governments fits.

``Maybe the most frightening thing about (the) groups is that they are becoming more successful,`` said Philip B. Elfstrom, the longtime Kane County Forest Preserve District president who has taken his lumps from protest groups on a number of issues in recent years.

Jan Carlson, the Republican chairman of Kane County, calls such groups a

``mixed bag.`` Although he is sympathetic to many of their causes, some are so narrowly focused that they make it difficult for county officials to govern with the general public welfare in mind, he said.

State Sen. Bob Kustra (R-Park Ridge), the political science professor running for lieutenant governor, warns that injecting purely local protests into statewide elections can be dangerous to good government although it is helpful to local government. ``All (statewide) candidates have noticed more NIMBY groups this year,`` Kustra said.

NIMBY is the abbreviation many government officials use to describe protest groups. It stands for Not In My Back Yard.

The groups also seem to favor acronyms for names, such as CATCH, STOP and IRATE. EDKO, for example, stands for Educated Disposal for Kane County.

However, some groups have evolved beyond the NIMBY stage, though they still leap into local frays when the need arises. The McHenry County Defenders, a respected environmental organization that put together one of the region`s first successful recycling programs, is second in political power only to the Republican Party in McHenry. The Defenders` political action committee can get candidates elected to county office, officials say; the Democrats can`t.

In Kane County, a coalition of NIMBY groups is emerging that could evolve into a permanent watchdog organization and possibly a challenge to the existing Republican power structure.

Protest groups have been popping up in Chicago for generations, and community activist Saul Alinsky raised the phenomenon to a form of art several decades ago. But the current NIMBY explosion in suburbia is less than 10 years old, with its roots going back only a little more than 20 years.

The groups have been most successful on the suburban fringe of the collar counties where there is still an environment to protect, and less so in Du Page County, where rapid growth overwhelmed resistance before anyone knew what happened.

Typically, NIMBY groups arise to meet a crisis and disappear when the threat is past. Sometimes they reappear. On rare occasions they become permanent organizations.

Steven Thompson, a manufacturers` representative, got his start in west suburban Wheaton fighting an attempt by a fast-food chain to put an eatery alongside a nature trail. He then moved to a rural area near Wasco in Kane County to get away from suburbia.

The tranquility lasted a couple of years until the state offered his yard as part of the site for the superconducting supercollider and he joined CATCH to fight it. CATCH dissolved after winning that one. But a developer later proposed a subdivision in a cornfield behind Thompson`s house, and he was back in action within a year as head of E-3-a group fighting suburban-style subdivisions in rural areas. (The name stands for a classification of real estate zoning.)

Because they perceive a common enemy-government-E-3 is now talking on a regular basis with other protest groups.

``There is a great deal of interconnecting now,`` said Louis E. Marchi, a retired chemist and one of the founders of the McHenry County Defenders, a group that originated to fight the Fox Valley Freeway in 1970 and after winning that battle converted into an environmental organization. ``In the old days-the early 1970s-we didn`t have any other groups to talk to.``